CNBC reported that nine Google employees were arrested on trespassing charges Tuesday night in protest of the company's $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli government. The sit-ins took place at Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's office in Sunnyvale and in the 10th floor commons of Google's New York office. From the report: The arrests, which were streamed live on Twitch by protesters, followed rallies in front of Google offices in New York, Sunnyvale and Seattle that drew hundreds of protesters, officials said. […] Sunnyvale protesters sat in Kurian's office for more than nine hours before being arrested, writing demands on Kurian's whiteboard and wearing shirts that read “Googlers Against Genocide.” was. In New York, protesters sat in a common area on the third floor. Five workers in Sunnyvale and four in New York state were arrested.
Chayne Anderson, a Washington-based Google Cloud software engineer, told CNBC: “On a personal level, I don't care about Google's military contracts, no matter what government relationships they have or what the contracts are.'' I'm against it,” he said. “And I hold that opinion because Google is an international company and no matter what military branch you're in, there's always going to be people on the receiving end…Google's employee base and… These are the people who are represented by the user base.'' Anderson flew to Sunnyvale to protest at Kurian's office and was among the workers arrested Tuesday. A Google spokesperson told CNBC: “Google Cloud uses publicly available cloud computing services to support many governments in the countries in which we operate, including the government of Israel. “This initiative is not intended to target sensitive or classified information,” he added. Military workloads related to weapons and intelligence services. ”
